OpenBSD on SGI: A Rollercoaster Story

justin66 73 days ago |

That was a pretty epic story. I'll admit that I skimmed a few parts. :)

Sad that it's discontinued, but mostly it's remarkable that so much was done by so few people.

pjmlp 74 days ago |

Very interesting story.

I used to regularly visit SGI documentation due to OpenGL/IrisGL, Inventor, and the original HP STL C++ documentation that SGI hosted, and naturally dive into Irix documentation in boring days.

fleeno 73 days ago |

I wish it was still supported, but I'm sure I was one of very few that was actually using it! Even then it was just for fun.

brynet 73 days ago | |

There is someone on GitHub who's been trying to keep OpenBSD/sgi alive out-of-tree using bits and pieces (e.g: userland binaries) of OpenBSD/octeon, which remains supported.

https://github.com/the-machine-hall/openbsd-sgi

fleeno 73 days ago | | |

Thanks, that looks promising!

lproven 73 days ago | |

As I understand it, Loongson is very close to MIPS. I think I remember reading that just 4 patented instructions were removed from the MIPS ISA, and I am not even sure that they were replaced.

If so, that means that new MIPS-family hardware is being made today. And ISTM that represents a new target market or audience for this.

brynet 72 days ago | | |

AFAIK Loongson is dead and isn't made anymore, and unlike OpenBSD/sgi, Loongson was a little-endian arch. OpenBSD/octeon is a closer match, but also discontinued as Cavium switched to making ARM CPUs.

LoongArch is a new ISA and isn't MIPS compatible, and OpenBSD doesn't support it.

lproven 72 days ago | | |

> FAIK Loongson is dead and isn't made anymore,

Wrong. It is alive and well and in production from several vendors.

https://www.loongson.cn/EN

> Loongson was a little-endian arch

True.

https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch...

But... so?

> LoongArch is a new ISA

Partly. It is new but it's still close. A former colleague wrote about it:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/02/china_loongson_mips/

The article cites this post on the LKML:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/87pmu1q5ms.wl-maz@kernel.org/

« You keep saying "not MIPS", and yet all I see is a blind copy of the MIPS code. »

Alpine supports it:

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Loongarch64

Debian is working on it:

https://wiki.debian.org/LoongArch

Gentoo is working on it:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:LoongArch

Doesn't sound dead to me. Sounds a lot more alive than multiple architectures that OpenBSD does support.

brynet 72 days ago | | |

I didn't say Loogson the company was dead, or that LoongArch was either. I said the predecessor Loongson/Godson CPUs are, like the 2E and 2F, which were MIPS-compatible. They're not manufactured anymore, and were practically unobtainium when they were.

LoongArch is not MIPS, despite it having similarities. It's a new platform/ISA and requires a completely different toolchain and new OS port.

It is not at all "new MIPS-family hardware is being made today" like you originally wrote, and it has little to no relevance to SGI hardware.

lproven 71 days ago | | |

> I didn't say Loogson the company was dead

Yeah you did.

« AFAIK Loongson is dead and isn't made anymore »

You are angrily arguing against things I didn't say and am not saying. I suspect you're downvoting me as well.

I never claimed it was entirely compatible, because it wasn't. Nobody ever said it was.

I'm saying that there are MIPS like architectures still being made today, and I stand by it. You seem to think they don't count. You have not coherently explained why. Maybe they are not close enough for you, maybe the endianness is not the one you want. I don't know and TBH I don't care.

It's close. It's related. There is new hardware in the greater MIPS-like family. If you or Theo de Raadt don't like it, that is not my problem.

You said, although now you're backtracking, that it's dead. That is not true.

I called you on saying things that are not true and ISTM that now you are trying to quibble.